I remember how they used to try to test it; how my parents would ask names and things about family history that they thought no one in the room but they themselves knew or remembered. One of these tests was to ask for my maternal grandmother’s maiden name. It was usually spoken of as Eunice Gear (her adopted name), but they forgot that I had noted and remembered her romantic story, and knew her real name (Albro) as well as I did my own. And here is where my double-dyed hypocrisy comes in: I willed the thing to write “Eunice Albro” and, whether consciously or unconsciously, I cannot now say, guided the movement of the machine in the formation of the letters; but, watching it, as “Albro” was being written, I cried out, feigning surprise, “Why, that isn’t right--it isn’t writing Grandma’s name!” Father and Mother, watching eagerly, hushed me up, and the thing wrote “Albro,” instead of “Gear.” Excited and mystified, Father explained to the onlookers about Grandma’s early abduction, adding that the children had probably always heard her spoken of by the name of her foster parents. This was often cited as the most signal triumph Planchette had to its credit. It was but one of my many conscious intrigues with the little machine. Often, of course, the answers were evasive or ambiguous, but I made them definite when I could, and then they were very convincing. One night a young woman spectator asked a silent question. This disturbed, but did not nonplus me. I knew she was having a love affair whose course was not running smoothly, so made the oracle declare: “_There’s many a slip_ _’Twixt the cup and the lip_,” and although she laughed it away and said there was no sense in the answer, subsequent events showed that I probably hit the nail on the head. Much later I learned that a real tragedy for her was going on at that very time. And there was that poor girl depending on such flimsy help as this for solution of her difficulties! I tremble when I think what indirect harm such practices may work--palmistry, and other occult things--with impressionable, uncritical minds, swayed powerfully by the hit-and-miss guesses of these worthless oracles.